Beatriz at Dinner arrives in theaters tomorrow after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, in the immediate aftermath of Inauguration Day and the Women’s Marches that followed. Salma Hayek (as the titular Beatriz) plays a working-class Mexican immigrant who unexpectedly finds herself sharing a meal with jubilant one-percenters, captained by a casually racist, thrice-married septuagenarian Doug Strutt (John Lithgow), a real estate mogul saddled with negative press.

The inevitable comparisons to the current occupant of the Oval Office have mostly helped the film, although during Tuesday’s press day at the Whitby Hotel—less than one block from Trump Tower—Hayek, Lithgow, director Miguel Arteta, and Connie Britton (who portrays the gathering’s hostess, Cathy) likely felt they were being addressed more like cable news pundits than artists. “We really don’t want to tag it as [a movie about Trump],” Lithgow said. “We made this before the election, before there was this political sea change. When it happened, it became a much, much more dimensional and urgent film.” Even Strutt’s bombast against a certain European nation—“France is like a Third World country. You can’t get anything done there”—has extra resonance following last month’s election of Emmanuel Macron over far-right opponent Marine Le Pen.

The catalyst for the screenwriter, Mike White, was the July 2015 slaughter of Cecil, the lion that had mostly resided in an animal sanctuary in Zimbabwe before being killed by a Minnesota dentist for a reported $50,000. White said he wrote the script in a two-week stretch. “He was very emotional writing it, and it just kind of came pouring out,” said Arteta, who directed two of White’s previous features (Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl) plus four episodes of Enlightened, the cancelled HBO series White created with star Laura Dern (she and her Big Little Lies costars, in character, could have seamlessly crossed over into this project). In the film, Strutt enrages Beatriz, a holistic healer and vegetarian, when he brandishes an iPhone snapshot of himself alongside a rhinoceros he killed. “I don’t consider it murder,” he explains onscreen. “It’s like this original dance of man and beast, the struggle for survival.” (The elder Trump sons took their own hunting trip to Zimbabwe in 2011, where they posed, at one point, with a lifeless cheetah carcass.)

“The movie’s a plea for compassion,” Arteta says, particularly in the digital age: Whenever anyone in Beatriz at Dinner reaches for a cellphone, something terrible happens. In one early scene, the female party guests (rounded out with Chloë Sevigny and Transparent’s Amy Landecker) initiate bonding by poring over a leaked crotch shot sent by a fictional starlet to her gynecologist. Even though they are acting, watching female celebrities like Britton and Sevigny aim withering looks toward a stand-in for Jennifer Lawrence, Selena Gomez, and other real-life ingénues who’ve been hacked or had their pictures leaked is a disarming visual. Far-from-reticent Beatriz spends the meal trying to figure out why Strutt looks so familiar; instead of just asking him, she eventually finds a computer and Googles him. “[Technology]’s made us more callous, for sure,” Arteta said at the press day. “One of the things that is so brilliant about smartphones is that it emphasizes . . . apathy and isolation and self-entitlement. It just plays to all those values that our consumer society is trying to push on us.”

Although, as Lithgow said, White had “the bright idea of putting together . . . people at one end of the economic spectrum dealing with people at the other end in an actual, reasoned debate,” in real life, “it doesn’t happen,” at least not that way. Even the film shoot wasn’t exactly a riot of differing opinions: Lithgow describes it as “a love-in.” Former Friday Night Lights and Nashville star Britton says that “everybody in the cast has a political bent” (Arteta insists this “wasn’t a prerequisite”), which presumably made for interesting break time conversations, as most of the scenes were filmed in late August 2016. Hayek appeared in one of Hillary Clinton’s Spanish-language campaign ads last year, and does not support a wall between Mexico and the United States; she and Britton are both equal-pay proponents who have criticized President Trump’s decision for the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. (Britton was also wearing a Planned Parenthood button at the press day.) When accepting a SAG Award in January for his work on The Crown, Lithgow championed Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump screed at that month’s Golden Globes. Meanwhile, on Monday evening, he dressed up as former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for the Public Theater Annual Gala in Central Park.

Four years ago, Mexico-born Hayek became a U.S. citizen. Four years before that, in 2009, she married François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and CEO of the global luxury group Kering, which owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen, among other brands. She divides her time between London, Paris, and Washington state, where her animal sanctuary houses about 50 tenants, among them horses, alpacas, dogs, hens, turkeys, and rabbits. “It feels like America is redefining itself in many ways, and it terrifies me, the direction it’s going,” she said, hours before attending the film’s Gucci-sponsored screening at the Metrograph, joining Michael Cera, Gina Gershon, Carla Gugino, Abbi Jacobson, Alia Shawkat, Julie Taymor, and Kathleen Turner for an after-party at Mr. Purple, the rooftop bar at the Lower East Side’s Hotel Indigo. “I get to travel a lot and live in different countries . . . whereas some people here defend [the direction the U.S. government is moving in] . . . I’ve never encountered one [person] outside of the United States that d[oes]n’t think it’s pitiful . . . and shocking.” Unlike in the past, when Hayek said, “There were a lot of people that really respected America,” and “some people that hate[d] America,” “now it’s becoming that everybody’s beginning [to say] either they hate it or disrespect it.” She also lamented that for many years, women “didn’t even talk about” the gender pay gap “because we thought it was okay ‘til very recently.” In this country, she said, “the respect for all human beings—regard[less] of their background or gender—seems to be suspended.”

Filming was a pleasure, but prior to arriving on set, Beatriz at Dinner’s collaborators endured plenty of challenges. “Finding the financing for a movie that you have a Latina at the center of it, it was really hard,” Arteta said, even though Hayek is an Oscar-nominated actress (for 2002’s Frida). “I think people are scared of marketing a movie like that,” he continued. If they weren’t, “Why doesn’t Salma Hayek get more leading parts? She’s terrifically talented, on top of being beautiful.” Additionally, he says, “You have great Latino directors, but they don’t touch the Latino experience. ‘Cause it doesn’t sell tickets . . . . As a Latino making a movie about a Latina experience, that is a little rare.” A critical investment eventually came from Aaron L. Gilbert of Bron Studios, part of the team behind another forthcoming Hayek release, Drunk Parents, costarring her former 30 Rock love interest, Alec Baldwin.

Beatriz at Dinner opens with the protagonist discovering that an Altadena, California, neighbor has secretly killed one of her pet goats, breaking his neck. This scene was in the original script Hayek read in September 2015. In a terrible coincidence, the following February, Hayek said, “I even had a dog that got killed by a neighbor like in the movie!” CNN reported that Mozart, a Belgian Malinois who wandered from her Washington property, was fatally shot with a pellet gun when the bullet made contact with the dog’s pulmonary artery. “It was kind of eerie,” said Arteta.

Beatriz’s dinner invitation comes courtesy of Cathy, mother to a recovered cancer patient who was treated by “saint” Beatriz. But as the film finds out, she’s not exactly a saint—particularly when she’s inebriated. Humorless Beatriz “has no social graces, and there’s a lot of darkness there,” Arteta said. Regardless, the movie is “on Beatriz’s side—”not that viewers will leave the theater hating Strutt. “He’s got a little bit of empathy,” Lithgow said, adding: “He’s got great humor, he loves life . . . he’s self-satisfied, but he’s not smug,” and “he’s not threatened by anything and he’s not paranoid.” Ideally, Britton hopes the film helps people “maybe understand a little bit better what drives them, what motivates them. Or their neighbors.”